The Last Hunt
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'The undisputed champion of South African crime. Meyer grabs you but the throat and never lets you go' Wilbur Smith
'From its startling opening to its tense and thrilling conclusion, Deon Meyer's The Last Hunt takes you on a whirlwind safari across two continents. In the whole of the Benny Griessel series so far, the stakes have never been higher or the odds so much against' Peter Robinson
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A cold case for Captain Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido of the Hawks elite police unit - not what they were looking for. And a difficult case, too. The body of Johnson Johnson, ex-cop, has been found beside a railway line. He appears to have jumped from South Africa's - perhaps the world's - most luxurious train, and two suspicious characters seen with him have disappeared into thin air. The regular police have already failed to make progress and others are intent on muddying the waters.
Meanwhile in Bordeaux, Daniel Darret is settled in a new life on a different continent. A quiet life. But his skills as an international hit-man are required one more time, and Daniel is given no choice in the matter. He must hunt again - his prey the corrupt president of his homeland.
Three strands of the same story become entwined in a ferocious race against time - for the Hawks to work out what lies behind the death of Johnson, for Daniel to evade the relentless Russian agents tracking him, for Benny Griessel to survive long enough to take another huge step in his efforts to piece together again the life he nearly destroyed - and finally ask Alexa Bernard to marry him.
The Last Hunt shows one of the great crime writers operating at the peak of his powers.
Customer Reviews
Another country
South African journo turned advertising man turned author of crime fiction. There's been a major recent sales bump for Fever (2017), his standalone post-apocalyptic novel about a couple of South African survivors of a deadly virus that devastates the world. I wonder why.
In this one, recovering alcoholic Captain Benny Griessel and his partner, Vaughn Cupido of the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit in Cape Town investigate the rapidly cooling if not yet stone cold case of Johnson Johnson, an ex-cop turned bodyguard, who was thrown out of a train. (a guy with a name like that was probably a d**k if you ask me). Turns out it was suicide not murder, and there was mucho political corruption involved (It's South Africa, after all.) A second story line involves Daniel Durret, a black dude trying to live a quiet life in the Bordeaux region of France. The author skilfully draws the two story lines together near the end.
Good crime fiction paints a more accurate and thoughtful picture of life in its location than most other writing. Examples include Ian Rankin's Edinburgh, Jo Nesbo's Oslo, James Lee Burke's Louisiana bayou/East Texas, George Pelekanos's Washington, et cetera. You can add Deon Meyer's Cape Town to that list.
One of the best
Not long after buying the Afrikaans version and translating it one word at a time, I decided to just wait and buy the English version. It was quite a wait but well worth it. An amazing story that had me do something that a book hasn’t done in a long time - keep me reading until 3am when I had work at 8am the next morning. This story had me hooked until the last second and now I must wait until the next book to see how far the ending reverberates. It also makes you look at the world and your own country (I’m Australian). Makes you ask questions. Makes you think.